مشخصات پژوهش

The proposed study holds significance for multiple fields because it advances a theoretical synthesis that literary scholarship has not yet exploited. Žižekian criticism remains influential within cultural theory, yet its application to canonical American literature remains limited. A comprehensive Žižekian analysis of The Catcher in the Rye addresses this gap by showing how the novel dramatizes ideological structures through a rhetoric of desire rather than explicit belief. Scholars such as Dean and Stavrakakis have emphasized Žižek’s importance for understanding the link between fantasy and ideology, yet literary studies rarely adopt his framework in detailed textual analysis. By insulating Holden’s discourse within a matrix of fantasy, symptom, and enjoyment, the project contributes to psychoanalytic literary criticism through a model that surpasses familiar Freudian or structuralist accounts (Dean; Stavrakakis). The research also enriches Salinger studies. Critics often focus on trauma, alienation, or cultural criticism, yet they seldom explore how the novel reveals the subject’s unconscious complicity with ideological norms. Scholars such as French, and Whitfield highlight the social pressures within postwar America, yet none unpack the relation between these pressures and the dynamics of enjoyment. A Žižekian approach reframes the novel as a text that dramatizes ideological desire, thereby clarifying why Holden’s moral stance fails to produce an alternative political or ethical position. Finally, the project offers a methodological intervention with implications beyond Salinger. Žižek’s theory permits a mode of close reading that uncovers ideological content embedded within narrative form rather than explicit message. This method provides a transferable model for future analyses of literary texts that explore the intersections of ideology, desire, and subject formation. Consequently, the study advances a priority area in literary scholarship by demonstrating t